Rural Project Examples: Effective
Browse rural projects that meet this collection's second highest level of evidence. For each example listed, the approach has been reported in a peer-reviewed publication.
Farm Dinner Theater
Updated/reviewed November 2024
- Need: To encourage farmers to make health and safety changes on their farms.
- Intervention: Farm Dinner Theater is an event in which farmers and their families watch three 10-minute plays covering health and safety topics and then discuss solutions to the issues addressed in each.
- Results: In a study, farmers who attended the plays were more likely to make changes and tell others what they learned, compared to farmers who received an educational packet with the same information.
Medical Legal Partnership of Southern Illinois
Updated/reviewed November 2024
- Need: Legal barriers often prevent economically disadvantaged people in Southern Illinois from obtaining positive health outcomes despite receiving medical care.
- Intervention: The Medical Legal Partnership of Southern Illinois (MLPSI) was formed to create a system where medical providers can refer patients in need of legal assistance to local attorneys.
- Results: Over 5,700 patients have utilized MLPSI since its founding in 2002. The program has relieved over $8.1 million in medical debt for both hospitals and patients.
Kentucky Homeplace
Updated/reviewed October 2024
- Need: Rural Appalachian Kentucky residents have deficits in health resources and health status, including high levels of cancer, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, and diabetes.
- Intervention: Kentucky Homeplace was created as a community health worker initiative to provide health coaching, increased access to health screenings, and other services.
- Results: From July 2001 to June 2024, over 196,801 rural residents were served. Preventive health strategies, screenings, educational services, and referrals are all offered at no charge to clients.
OHSU Rural Surgery Training
Updated/reviewed October 2024
- Need: General surgeons are needed in rural communities.
- Intervention: Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is sending residents to complete a general surgery rotation in rural southern Oregon.
- Results: 19 graduates of the rural residency program are currently practicing in a rural setting. The residents remain more likely than other OHSU residents to enter general surgery practice and to serve in a community of fewer than 50,000 people.
Meadows Diabetes Education Program
Updated/reviewed September 2024
- Need: To provide diabetes care and education services to those in rural southeast Georgia.
- Intervention: Diabetes outreach screening, education, and clinical care services were provided to participants in Toombs, Tattnall, and Montgomery counties. The program is no longer active.
- Results: Patients successfully learned self-management skills to lower their blood sugar, cholesterol, and blood pressure.
Community Health Worker-based Chronic Care Management Program
Updated/reviewed August 2024
- Need: Improve healthcare access and decrease chronic disease disparities in rural Appalachia.
- Intervention: A unique community health worker-based chronic care management program, created with philanthropy support.
- Results: After a decade of use in attending to population health needs, health outcomes, healthcare costs, in 2024, the medical condition-agnostic model has a 4-year track record of financial sustainability with recent scaling to include 31 rural counties in a 3-state area of Appalachia and recent implementation in urban areas.
The Health-able Communities Program
Updated/reviewed August 2024
- Need: Expand healthcare access for the more remote residents of 3 frontier counties in north central Idaho.
- Intervention: With early federal grant-funding, a consortium of healthcare providers and community agencies used a hybrid Community Health Worker model to augment traditional healthcare delivery services in order to offer a diverse set of health-related interventions to frontier area residents.
- Results: With additional private grant funding, success continued to build into the current model of an established and separate CHW division within the health system's population health department.
Care for Our Elders/Wakanki Ewastepikte
Updated/reviewed June 2024
- Need: To provide Lakota elders with tools and opportunities for advance care planning.
- Intervention: An outreach program in South Dakota helps Lakota elders with advance care planning and wills by providing bilingual brochures and advance directive coaches.
- Results: Care for Our Elders saw an increase in the number of Lakota elders understanding the differences between a will and a living will and the need to have end-of-life discussions with family and healthcare providers.
HoMBReS
Updated/reviewed May 2024
- Need: To reduce the risk of HIV/STDs among Latino men living in rural regions of the United States.
- Intervention: Soccer team leaders are elected and trained as lay health advisors to promote sexual health education among team members.
- Results: Program participants report an increase in HIV testing, an increase in condom use, and an increase in awareness of how to prevent the transmission of HIV.
Project Lazarus
Updated/reviewed May 2024
- Need: To reduce overdose-related deaths among prescription opioid users in rural Wilkes County, North Carolina.
- Intervention: Education and tools are provided for prescribers, patients and community members to lessen drug supply and demand, and to reduce harm in prescription opioid use.
- Results: Opioid overdose death rates have decreased in Wilkes County.